The Problem With Paying People to Bike to Work

France got a lotofattention
last summer when it announced a pilot program to pay workers to commute
by bicycle. The buzz was well-deserved: in offering people money to
ride to the office—a modest 25 euro cents a kilometer, or about 43 U.S.
cents a mile right now—France took a fresh approach to the stale problem
of car reliance. But the results of the six-month trial haven't been shared nearly as widely, perhaps because they're not super impressive.

The French ministry overseeing the trial reports
that 419 people agreed to ride to work by the end of it. That's up from
200 cyclists at the start, but it's not a very hefty chunk of the 8,200
or so employees eligible to participate, especially considering that
the June–November trial was prime cycling season. And while 19 percent
of the new riders switched from driving, most of those had been part of
carpools, leaving the true mode shift away from cars closer to 5
percent.

So those are OK results, and France gets lots of credit for
innovation here. If it wants to keep paying people to cycle to work,
more power to it. But broadly speaking there are two main problems with
bribing—or, if you prefer, financially nudging—people to bike to work.

The first, pointed out
by transport scholars Ralph Buehler and Andrea Hamre shortly after the
French program was announced, is cheap or free parking. Their research has found
that when employers offer benefits to all commuters—free parking as
well as transit passes and cycling subsidies—the probability that
workers will drive alone actually goes up compared to a baseline of no
benefits. The only reliable way to get employees out of their cars is to
provide alternative benefits while eliminating free spaces.

CityLab

The second problem is our stubborn brain. Cognitive scientists now believe that commuting habits (among others) are so fixed and automatic
that we aren't making a true mode "choice" every morning after all. But
there are certain moments in life where habits become vulnerable,
including a change in jobs, and the evidence shows that commuter
interventions have the greatest impact when they're targeting to these windows of opportunity.

Again, France's experiment with paying people to ride to work was by
no means a failure. Its impact was marginal, but it was marginal in the
desired direction, even without much monetary force. But the real
discussion officials need to have is about the best use of this limited
money. Perhaps those same resources would have done more good expanding
bike lanes, or focusing on workers who just changed jobs, or confronting
the politically unpopular topic of free parking.

It's certainly necessary to give bicycle riders the same commuter
benefits as everyone else. But if the goal is to get people to ride
instead of drive, just paying them is far from sufficient.